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Rural and remote area electrification is of grave concern around the globe. Therefore, well-planned and cost-effective microgrids integrating renewable energy sources are emerging as effective solutions. However, the microgrid's stable operation and its future deployment is affected by the perturbations caused due to uncertainity in renewable sources, dependency on the battery state of charge, and load variation. So, considering the possible concerns affecting the planning and development of a microgrid for any given region, this paper proposes a comprehensive performance assessment of the hybrid residential microgrid based on a load model of Kibber village in Himachal Pradesh, India. The proposed approach is divided into three parts for the best planning of microgrids. Firstly, the MATLAB–Simulink software technically analyzes the system performance under perturbations considering the available renewable sources. Secondly, an economic analysis using HOMER Pro software is done to examine the cost-effectiveness of the proposed microgrid model through the simulation of electrical loads for Kibber village, considering the available renewable sources. Lastly, a real-time analysis of the proposed prototype of programmable logic controller-based hardware test bench has been developed, aiming for future regional microgrid deployment. System voltage, frequency, power shared, percentage of load met, energy cost, available renewable energy resource, etc. have been considered for validating the proposed controller. The proposed comprehensive assessment of the microgrid model is reproducible with necessary modifications for any geographical location. It will be helpful for its future deployment aiming at rural and remote electrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, with the increase in the penetration of various renewable energy sources (RESs) into power systems, the complications related to the stability issues have increased. The main contribution of this paper is an in‐depth analysis of research in microgrid based on small‐signal, transient, and voltage stability. The small‐signal stability has been discussed based on uncertain load, limitation in power generation capacity, and nature of sluggish feedback observed in few microgrid systems. Instability caused by a transient phenomenon in microgrid has been thoroughly analyzed for losses in distributed energy resources (DERs), islanding and transition modes of operation, load shedding, and faults causing instability. The voltage fluctuations are duly considered in the perspective of load shedding, type of loads, power unbalancing, and different types of faults in microgrid systems. The existing controllers have been compared based on steady‐state error, response time, and robustness etc. The voltage, frequency, and active/reactive power control are analyzed based on centralized, decentralized, hierarchal/distributed control schemes aiming stabilization of microgrid systems. Finally, stability improvement features have been explored in detail, finding the implementation of microgrid stabilizers, energy storage devices, FACTS devices, load balancing, resource forecasting including the adaptive controller. Hence, the uniqueness of this paper can be considered as a state‐of‐the‐art review of the abovementioned stability components in the microgrid system which is not available in the published literature with a similar amount of vastness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power quality issues are challenging in microgrid due to the presence of various types of renewable energy resources unlike conventional power system. So, the main objective of this research is to quantify the power quality considering the fuzziness in variation of voltage, frequency, power factor and total harmonic distortion (THD) due to the occurrence of voltage sag, swell, interruption and unbalancing in three-phase AC microgrid feeding static and rotational loads. Therefore, a novel power quality monitoring index (PQMI) is proposed to determine the status of power quality. Total 256 numbers of rules are formed for fuzzy inference system (FIS) to assess PQMI considering the acceptable limits of above mentioned four input variables as per IEEE/IEC standards. The proposed methodology is verified through Mamdani and Sugeno type FIS using Matlab-Simulink software. It is also found that the proposed PQMI is significant to define the status of microgrid even during transition from grid-connected to islanded mode and vice-versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To find a sustainable municipal solid waste (MSW) management and renewable electricity generation system is need of the hour. In modern hybrid electricity generation systems, the use of MSW on priority is not evaluated yet. To satisfy this need, a small scale MSW based microgrid is proposed and evaluated in economic and reliability terms. First, the waste of the selected city is characterized considering four seasons summer, spring, autumn and winter for a complete year. Then a microgrid system is designed using MSW processing techniques namely, anaerobic digestion (AD) and gasification that are further integrated with solar photovoltaic (PV) system, battery and the main grid. The size of the microgrid is optimized using an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm targeting the configuration that meets the desired system reliability requirements with minimum cost. The proposed system found as a sustainable approach to process the MSW of a small city (0.1 million population) and a reliable mean to fulfill the electricity demand of a village having 225 houses in India. The annualized system cost (ASC) of the proposed hybrid system found to be INR 5760919 with levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) 5.65 INR/kWh (0.0737 USD/kWh). The total MSW landfilling avoided cost is 451898.9 INR/year that is 17% of its processing cost. [Display omitted] • Proposed sustainable utilization of municipal solid waste for electricity generation. • Municipal solid waste based microgrid is conceptualized and optimized. • Proposed system is evaluated in economic and reliability terms. • The system avoids a significant amount of investment for landfilling of waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]